Suda51 Lifts The Lid On Killer Is Dead Details

Says You'll Fight A Yakuza Member Riding A Tiger

If I had a brainwave every time I sat down on the loo, I'd almost certainly be a trillionaire by now. But Suda51's creative eureka moments yield the weird, the onderful, and the downright batty.

Talking to Famitsu about the latest instalment in the loosely-collected 'assassins' series - Killer Is Dead - Suda lifted the lid on a few extra details about Grasshopper's upcoming carve-em-up, with one such revelatory vignette having central character Mondo sat on a motorbike, facing off against a Yakuza boss riding a tiger.

“One thing we got to do with this game, is you fighting against a yakuza guy riding a tiger," he said. "You’re in Kyoto, among all these old-style buildings, and [hero] Mondo is on this motorbike fighting against a yakuza on a tiger!

“And the game’s packed with these sorts of situations, the kind you won’t see in any other game. That Kyoto battle got concepted out surprisingly early on, too; I guess we felt like overseas gamers ought to see what Kyoto looks like.”

Suda also revealed a little of Mondo's nature, highlighting the differences between Mondo and No More Heroes' Travis Touchdown. “Mondo’s an executioner, not an assassin. You have that ‘execution’ nuance added to the act of murdering your foes. The hero’s job is to wipe out these serious villains, real AAA-class international terrorists.

“He’s dressed so smartly that you might wonder if he’s actually capable of killing, but once the ‘work’ switch is pulled, his aura completely turns around. The story depicts him as a man who just does his job without putting much of any emotion into it.”

As for the look of the game, Suda explained that returning to a rather striking, idiosyncratic cel-shaded style, noting the progression from Killer7, and the new opportunities that advances in technology had afforded the developers. “We tried going for more realistic visuals at first. But it just didn’t produce the sort of unique expression we wanted with this game. So we turned it all around.

“I think Killer7 was the best we could do in art expression at the time it came out, but if we just recreated that, it’d merely seem old at this point. So we really pursued an art style that seemed modern with our shading technology. There was a lot of trial and error behind what you see now.” [via Polygon]